The College Board and Khan Academy are offering free SAT prep tutorials to boost scores on the new (as of March 2016) SAT. The site is at https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/sat.

Students studying 20 hours through the Khan Academy personalized lessons, on average, showed a 115-point improvement between their PSAT and SAT scores. This was double the average of students who did not use the Khan tutorials.

According to College Board President David Coleman, "It is good news that practice is an equal opportunity employer. And the great news is that it is free."

More information can be found at: https://edsource.org/2017/free-khan-academy-sat-tutorials-boost-scores-study-finds/581450.

Concord Review (http://www.tcr.org/) expanded its 2-week summer program to Seoul, Korea. If you're contemplating submitting a paper to TCR and you want a better chance of achieving Emerson Award Winning status, this might prove a worthwhile summer enrollment. Though be forewarned, the price tag for Seoul is $4,500 without room and board; regardless, for the summer of 2017, all seats have been taken, but a wait list is available.

The program consists of lectures on the research and writing process, as well as 'mapping out topics', searching out new evidence, refining a topic, note taking, cross-referencing citations, annotating, developing a bibliography, understanding historiography, editing and revising. A more comprehensive description of the program can be seen through the eyes of a recent participant, Ryan Chung, at http://www.tcr.org/resources/Documents/summer_program/%20Ryan%20Chung%20on%20TCR%20Summer%20Program.pdf.

Many times students who have applied to a campus, whether Princeton or another, and gotten wait listed or even rejected, can build after a year or more of college elsewhere the credentials to successfully transfer in.

Better still, there will be a new Transfer Common App in 2018 making the transfer process that much easier, especially for the nontraditional applicants, to submit transfer applications to multiple campuses. According to the Common App: "This new transfer application will not only better serve returning adult students (over the age of 25, now representing 38% of undergraduates) and students applying from community colleges (43% of all undergraduates), it will also facilitate the process for recommenders and member institutions."

In 2013 the American Academy of Arts & Sciences issued a report concerned with the US educational system, which was “narrowing” its broad liberal arts focus and whose foreign language efforts were in a precipitous decline.

The PISA, the triennial testing of 15-year-old students among 72 countries, revealed, once again in 2015that students from the United States are among the worst performing in reading comprehension and applying math and science concepts.

This year several students wishing to apply to private schools made claims that they could not get any of their junior or senior year teachers to write them recommendations. Eventually the truth emerged: they were too nervous to ask for a recommendation.

Getting into college is a major challenge. Yet, once in, prepare to work hard to uncover your capabilities and apply yourself. College can be a fabulous launching pad to a successful career or a series of careers.

National Public Radio (NPR) on December 15th broadcasted that ‘Students who get better career guidance remember college more fondly’; this observation was based on a Gallup-Purdue index survey of over 11,000 students.

Right after all the University of California and Cal State applications have been submitted, there is a brief lull before the January 1st deadlines. Many applicants contemplate, with a touch of apprehension, how their application will fare among the UCs and the more competitive Cal State programs.